Introducción

Brazilian Political Science Review
E-ISSN: 1981-3821
bpsr@bpsr.org.br
Associação Brasileira de Ciência Política
Brasil
Nascimento, Willber; da Silva Jr., José Alexandre; Paranhos, Ranulfo; Silva, Denisson;
Figueiredo Filho, Dalson Britto
Does Size Matter? Electoral Performance of Small Parties in Brazil
Brazilian Political Science Review, vol. 10, núm. 2, 2016, pp. 1-26
Associação Brasileira de Ciência Política
São Paulo, Brasil
Available in: http:--www.redalyc.org-articulo.oa?id=394346640005
How to cite
Complete issue
More information about this article
Journals homepage in redalyc.org
Scientific Information System
Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal
Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative
Does Size Matter?
Electoral Performance of Small Parties in Brazil*
Willber Nascimento
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
José Alexandre da Silva Jr.
Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil
Ranulfo Paranhos
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
Denisson Silva
Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil
Dalson Britto Figueiredo Filho
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
What is the impact of small parties on electoral
outcomes? This articles aims at contributing to the literature on
party systems by proposing a new method to classify political
parties. The methodology is applied to Brazil by focusing on the
description of the election results of small parties. Cluster analysis
is employed to classify political party size based on their
percentage of votes in the Brazilian states. The main findings
indicate that classifying parties through cluster analysis is more
objective than previous classifications. As a result of this method,
the article shows that small parties exert little effect on electoral
volatility in Brazil as well as small parties benefit less from the
disproportionality between votes and seats than the larger ones.
Keywords: Small parties; cluster ...